Page 33 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"Korren would have?—"
"Korren is dead." My voice drops to something low and final. "And the things Korren would have done are a poor blueprint for the things we need to survive. If you want to measure my decisions against a dead alpha's standards, you're welcome to do so from the position of someone who has a better option on the table. Do you, Halvor? Do you have a better option?"
The silence stretches. Around us, the barracks maintain the thin fiction of normalcy. Wolves pretending to eat, to mend clothing, to not listen.
"We have wolves depending on us to be smart enough to survive this," I say, quieter now. "I'm being smart enough. The math on that doesn't require your approval."
Halvor's chin drops half an inch. The tiniest concession, pulled from him like a splinter. Then his eyes shift, just for a second, the fury peeling back to show what's underneath it, and what I see there isn't anger at all. It's fear. Raw, unprocessed, the kind a young wolf doesn't have the vocabulary for: the terror that the one person holding his world together is slipping somewhere he can't follow, and if she goes, the wolves in this barracks have nothing between them and whatever Stellan decides they're worth.
He doesn't know that's what his face just said. I do.
"The mountain faction sent another message," he says, and his voice has changed. Quieter and steadier. The young wolf who wanted to shout has handed the reins to the soldier who knows when to report.
The temperature in the alcove shifts. "When?"
"A few days ago. Same runner as before, same route through the supply tunnels." His voice drops to something barely above a breath. "They're moving faster. Grimnir's wolves are staging in the high passes, and the faction wants to coordinate."
"Coordinate what, exactly?"
"They didn't specify. But the runner mentioned a timeline."
The spy network. The thread I've been watching from the periphery, the intelligence that connects the mountain faction dissidents to Grimnir's Ashvald wolves and runs directly through channels my own people have been using without telling me the full scope of what they're carrying. Halvor isn't the architect. He doesn't have the patience or the subtlety. But he's been receiving the messages and holding them because he didn't know who else to give them to.
Now he's giving them to me. With Torben's scent on my skin and his accusation still hanging in the air between us, Halvor is choosing his leader over his fury, and the cost of that choice is written in the rigid set of his shoulders.
"Who else knows about the messages?"
"Erla. Two of the older wolves." He pauses. "That's it."
"Keep it that way."
I leave him in the alcove and cross the barracks to where Erla sits on her pallet near the window, straight-backed, silver-haired, her hands folded in her lap with the stillness of a woman who's been watching my conversation with Halvor and already assembled her conclusions.
Erla doesn't waste time on preamble. "You carry the beta's scent like a flag."
"I'm aware."
"The wolves are talking."
"The wolves were talking before I walked through the door. Wolves are always talking. It's a species-wide character flaw."
The corner of Erla's mouth tightens. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment that the observation landed. She tilts her head, studying me with the cool appraisal of a woman who's survived two generations of alpha rule by reading people the way I read tactical maps: for weaknesses, for leverage, for the distance between what they say and what they mean.
"You know about the messages," she says. Not a question.
"Halvor just told me."
"Halvor tells you everything, eventually. The boy's discretion has a half-life measured in days." Erla's gaze moves past me to the barracks, cataloging wolves with the efficiency of long practice. "The question is what you intend to do with the information."
"The question is whether the information is complete. Is it?"
Erla's silence lasts precisely long enough to confirm that it isn't, and to communicate that the rest of it will cost more than asking.
"The faction runner uses a supply tunnel that exits below the eastern curtain wall," she says. "The tunnel connects to a route through the lower passes that Grimnir's scouts have been using since the snow retreated. Your beta's perimeter wolves have missed it because the entrance is masked by a hot spring vent that confuses the scent markers." She folds her hands tighter. "The runners aren't just carrying coordination schedules. They're carrying Grimnir's terms. He's proposed a mating alliance to Stellan, and the she-wolf he'll want most is the one sitting in this fortress with the highest strategic value to both packs."
She doesn't say my name. She doesn't need to.
The words land clean and cold. Grimnir's scouts have a route directly beneath the fortress walls, and the faction runners are carrying his political demands alongside their military coordination. The spy network isn't peripheral. It's arterial.
